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Track daily servings of fruit and veggies

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rgh101
rgh101 Posts: 9 Member
in Feature Suggestions and Ideas
One of my main health goals is to improve the number of servings of fruits and veggies I eat each day. I would love it if MFP would show and track that number (i.e. 3 servings of fruit, 4 servings of veg, etc.) Of course I can look at my diary and calculate it myself for a given day, but I'd find it more useful and motivating to be able to automatically track it over time, similar to nutrients. Thank you for considering!
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  • HammerBlue
    HammerBlue Posts: 1 Member
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    I would like this if it even just followed the current water tracking functionality, with reporting enabled on it.
  • Nova
    Nova Posts: 9,994 MFP Staff
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    Thanks, that's a great idea! We will share it with our team!!
  • chuck27p
    chuck27p Posts: 2 Member
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    I'm searching for this functionality. Maybe just a goal or something like "water" that I can enter manually, so when I eat a serving I can click "1 serving" and at the end of the day I can see that I have 5 servings of veggies and 3 of fruit. This would be immensely helpful.
  • mlake521
    mlake521 Posts: 2 Member
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    I agree! The number one diet for years has been the Mediterranean diet and it wants you to keep track of fruit and vegetable servings per day. I am currently doing this diet and would like to be able to use this app to keep track of that! I use a variety of fruits and vegetables in smoothies, overnight oats, etc. that do not necessarily constitute a full serving, but with several things eaten like that a day, it would be nice to know how many servings it equates to at the end of the day! I’m not interested in paying this much for an app to have to calculate it on my own separately every day! If
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,387 Member
    edited May 13
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    This may not work for others, but as a workaround with the current feature set, this is what I do:

    I already weigh the overwhelming majority of the food I eat (at home), in grams, and log it that way.

    At the end of the day, if I wish, I can go through my complete log and add up the number of grams of fruit and veggies. (I add them all together, since the fruit/veggie distinction is not that important to me.) Sometimes I just rough add. It takes less than a minute. Easy.

    I use the simplified assumption that 80 grams is one serving.

    I used to add up most days. Now I mostly don't. I'm a huge believer in focusing on establishing habits - routine ways of eating - that get me to my goals without micromanaging everything every day forever. Most of the time, now, I hit my target total (400g minimum, 800g+ ideal) without paying much attention. I might add up if I'm concerned on a particular day.

    Another option (that I don't do) would be to use the meal customization feature in the diary. We can have up to 6 meal "slots" , and we can name them anything we want. (We can even rename the default ones.) Some people use the meal slots for food categories, such as "supplements" "beverages" or variations on that theme. A person could have "Fruits" and "Veggies" slots if desired.

    None of this helps with those new schemes where people want to eat 30 or 40 different plant foods over the course of a week. Personally, I rough-counted a very typical week of eating, found I was getting between 30-40 different ones in that routine (maybe more, depending on which organization's counting rules I used). I figured I didn't need to much worry about it after that. YMMV.

    I have to admit, I worry a bit about slipping into obsession if wanting to be hyper-precise about things like this. Good nutrition and variety is important to me, absolutely. Exact counts of these things all the time, not as much. If it felt like game-ifying it to count routinely, i.e., really a fun thing, I probably would. If I felt like it was some kind of magic spell where I had to get every detail right in order to get the benefits, I'd be concerned about myself psychologically. Again, YMMV.

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